SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast

SUBTEXT is a podcast about the human condition, and what we can learn about it from the greatest inventions of the human imagination: fiction, film, drama, poetry, essays, and criticism. Each episode, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O’Luanaigh explore life’s big questions by conducting a close reading of a text or film and co-writing an audio essay about it in real time.

(post)script: Post-Gabler

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We continue our discussion of Hedda Gabler. Wes reads more from contemporaneous reviews (“Hedda Gabler is manifestly a lunatic of the epileptic class”) and Erin from Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay on the play (Lovborg’s being shamed by Thea’s concern for his sobriety is an excuse in a way, a “violation of his rights to ruin”). We talk about the “The Thin Man” — the winning dynamic between William Powell and Myrna Loy, the film’s deviation from a typical romantic comedy, and the alien familiarity of old movies. We continue with a discussion of the best four film stretch by a director in history; our upcoming episode on “The Awful Truth”; Erin’s enthusiasm for Screwball comedies; the approaching one year anniversary of our first recording; Erin’s money pit in her house of gold; how the podcast got started, and the night we first met (at a viewing party for “North by Northwest”); Wes’s finding a pile of books on the sidewalk, including Alexander Von Humboldt’s “Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent”; and finally, Samuel Pepys’s propensity for rogering.